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Bird Lady
- Southern Illinois University Press
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41 Bird Lady Two eyes Can’t take me deep enough Or climb the green reaches of this world— Spy still out in the cold, Bush-league voyeur, Mistress of the peepshow creep, I hang from my neck No albatross but a field glass (Though I have seen that sailor’s bird Haunt the clamjamfry, the offal Rising in a ship’s wake, Beak hooked like the Wandering Jew). Others may enter, like Alice, The wood where things have no name— Nature Anonymous, one might say— But I bring to book Every wingspan in the barrens, every Warbler on a bough, Days and weather and noms de plume Cited on my life list, My roll call of the wild. I have no use for Mobs with binoculars, or search parties Half-sick in a hired plane; 42 Unflappable, I go to ground alone: When fools take to the air, Wise women fall On their bellies, at peace With the worms and the working dead. Nor does my mother understand This solitary pleasure, wanting me To spoon and spark, To settle on my own nest. How can I make her Feel what drives me back From those breathmint passions, Ephemera of the lips and lower zones; Not even a sweet Aubade of birds On a bed-blessed morning can overcome The eggshell inconstancies of love. Had she read Theocritus, All that bleating and piping Composed among the pasture’s deep simplicities, She might have seen what Draws me to a hawk Fanning the cloud’s brow, or a mole Humping the dirt, Or the middle vision of Moths and butterflies, brushstrokes on the breeze; [44.202.198.173] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:13 GMT) 43 And might have learned How I can spread full-length In rain and bramble, dust and stone, To hear the doo-wop trill Of a thrush or a mating cry That sprays away the rival claims. I have the patience of a snake; I’m stubborn as a fir tree Green against the topiary snow. Pigeons I can put up with, And the bourgeois happiness of robins, If they know their place. But I give myself to Crows picking through the corn brakes, Conniption of grasshoppers in a fall field; To the way that chickadees Bring back the light After an ice storm, the wintry sun Flared out behind the low branches Bowed down to earth, and each dark peak Tipped in crystal; And to geese, our fair-weather friends, Wetbacks forcing the border, Burnt copper glint in their skin. Even sparrows on a fencepost Can make me pause, Though I’d prefer just once to see 44 The horned screamer of the swamp, An Egyptian stilt of cranes, or a secretary bird That batters out the quick of rats. With my thermos of tansy tea, my flask Of blackberry flip, hat tugged tight Against a tailing wind, I walk out on this world And follow the hot flash of feathers Where the sky breaks through, a flight Away from those heads bent over The business of prose and pangs, short end of a line That goes on as long as it has to. ...